Finding and transferring MVS Disk and
Tape Datasets

This is the second in a series of articles intended
to help Academic Mainframe users move data and files off
of that system.

As was
discussed in last month's issue,
Academic Mainframe services will no longer be available
to individuals after May of 2003. Last month's article
discussed transferring files from a CMS account. This
month features a discussion of transferring MVS data
files off of the mainframe.

FTP Update

First, however, there is an update to the use of FTP
to transfer files from a VM/CMS account. This process has
been made much easier by the fact that you no longer need
to use your minidisk (or ACCOUNT) password to access the
files on your CMS A disk. Instead, all you need to do is
use your CMS UserID and login password and you will be
automatically connected to the files on your A disk. If
you have more than one disk on your CMS account, you can
change to that disk by entering a "change
directory" command to .nnn, where
"." is your CMS login ID and
"nnn" is the address of the
disk. For example, in command line ftp if your USERID was
FZ99, to change to your 291 (perhaps accessed as your
"B" disk) disk you could enter:

cd FZ99.291

Using WS_FTP, you could accomplish the same task by
clicking on the "ChgDIr" button. Most people,
however, only have one disk, their "A" or 191
disk.

Finding Disk Data Sets

If you have run jobs on the MVS batch system, chances
are that you have saved MVS disk data sets. You can run a
"Mapdisk" job to find data sets you may have on
MVS disks. MVS disk storage is separate from CMS disk
storage, so you must run a batch job to list your data
sets. The following JCL will accomplish this for you:

Follow the directions provided in the JCL comments and
submit this job as you would any other batch job. For
convenience, you can access this file on the CMS D disk
and copy it to your A disk using the following command:

COPY MAPDISK JCL D MAPDISK JCL A

You can change the route card if you wish to send the
output directly to the printer. Otherwise, the output
will be returned to your CMS reader and you can examine
it there or receive it to your A disk. If you do need to
move MVS files, having an online copy of your data set
names will allow you to copy and paste those data set
names into JCL you will need to move the files.

If you do have any MVS data sets, they will be listed
in a format similar to the following:

Other than the data set name, the information to
notice is Record Format (RFm in the data header), Block
Size (BlkSz), Logical Record Length (Lrecl), and the the
disk volume where the data is stored (Serial). In the
example above, the data set is in Fixed/Blocked format,
has a Block Size of 32000 bytes, has an 80-byte Logical
Record Length, and is stored on the ACAD03 volume. This
information would be needed to write JCL to copy the file
from MVS to CMS for download (this is discussed below).

Finding Tape Datasets

It is possible to store data sets on MVS tape volumes.
There are relatively few Academic users, however, who
have existing tape data sets. Unless an extended
expiration date is specified, a tape data set will expire
within 6 months and the tape will be recycled. If,
however, you have written tape datasets and specified
that they should not expire, those data sets may still be
in the tape library.

If you've written tape data sets, you should have kept
a record of the tape Volume Serial number (usually a
6-digit number). If you have that number you can run a
Tapemap job to find out what data sets are on that tape.
You'll find a copy on the CMS D disk and can copy it to
your A disk using the following command:

COPY TAPEMAP JCL D TAPEMAP JCL A

You can then edit the JCL to include your User-ID,
name, and password, as well as to indicate the tape
volume where called for. Submit that job and you can use
the resulting listing to find out the data set names
stored on the tape and their format information needed to
access those data sets via JCL.

The punch data set will be returned to your CMS ID
separately from the program message output and you can
receive and download that file in order to import it into
Windows SPSS.

Getting Help

The items above are just a starting point to provide
some tools to begin the data transfer process. If you
have used the Academic Mainframe for a long period of
time, some or all of these tools should be familiar to
you. If you have a large amount of data to transfer, you
can make an appointment with ACS staff to help plan the
process and, if necessary, explore some alternate tools
to help accomplish the data transfer even more
efficiently.

Remember that after May of 2003, Mainframe files will
be inaccessible. The time to start the data transfer
process is now. ACS Staff are available to help, but
staff time will be much less available the closer to May
that we get.